Cumbria votes against nuclear waste site

[Fretwired]

I can't blame them - I doubt I'd like to live next door to one but the decision stalls and probably shelves plans to expand the nuclear power industry. Listening to a Green Party member on the radio she said the nuclear option is now dead and a government spokesman didn't contradict her saying no work on new plants can be done until the issue of waste has been solved.

Full story here: http://news.sky.com/story/1045037/cu...ear-waste-site

Looks like more windmills, although they don't seem to like wind ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ene...high-wind.html

[chillidoggy]

My understudy lives very close to a nuclear power station which is being decommissioned. He says the locals want another one built on the same site because they need employment, while the invasive tree-huggers are protesting against. I guess it's the same wherever you go?

[fatherjack]

My understudy lives very close to a nuclear power station which is being decommissioned. He says the locals want another one built on the same site because they need employment, while the invasive tree-huggers are protesting against. I guess it's the same wherever you go?

You have to admire their determination, though - there aren't many trees to hug down on the marsh.

[evilmags]

Just dump it all in Hull, one of the few places in the world that would be improved by a large deposit of nuclear waste.

[ICBM]

I wouldn't mind living next to - or right over - a deep-storage nuclear waste facility, provided the geology was sound and the procedures were managed correctly. Properly stored nuclear waste deep underground is less dangerous than living in a high-background-radiation area like Cornwall.

But the problem is that you can't trust the nuclear industry to do it correctly. The history of it is a long litany of incompetence, irresponsibility, deliberate deceit and cover-ups. 'Storage' becomes dumping, 'reprocessing' becomes dilution, material is 'lost', accidents are denied or downplayed.

I used to trust the physicists and the engineers that nuclear was safe and that it was just uninformed hippy nonsense to be wary or fearful of it. I'm no longer sure that you can even trust the engineers, and you never could trust the managers and politicians.

Perhaps the population of Cumbria are familiar enough with the way the industry works now.

[Fretwired]

Just dump it all in Hull, one of the few places in the world that would be improved by a large deposit of nuclear waste.

Right on top of Herr Prescott would get my vote ...

[musophilr]

I wouldn't mind living next to - or right over - a deep-storage nuclear waste facility, provided the geology was sound and the procedures were managed correctly. Properly stored nuclear waste deep underground is less dangerous than living in a high-background-radiation area like Cornwall.

But the problem is that you can't trust the nuclear industry to do it correctly. The history of it is a long litany of incompetence, irresponsibility, deliberate deceit and cover-ups. 'Storage' becomes dumping, 'reprocessing' becomes dilution, material is 'lost', accidents are denied or downplayed.

I used to trust the physicists and the engineers that nuclear was safe and that it was just uninformed hippy nonsense to be wary or fearful of it. I'm no longer sure that you can even trust the engineers, and you never could trust the managers and politicians.

Perhaps the population of Cumbria are familiar enough with the way the industry works now.

I tend to agree with this. On the latter point, if something goes wrong, just rename the site

[hungrymark]

I live in Cumbria. It was the County Council who voted against the site, not the population who are, by and large, massively in favour of nuclear industry. We've got nuclear power stations on the doorstep at Heysham, the reprocessing plant at Sellafield, and the nuclear submarine plant in Barrow. It's all good employment in an area of the country that badly needs it and is often overlooked. The Council are numpties IMO.

[halfstack]

I wouldn't mind living next to - or right over - a deep-storage nuclear waste facility, provided the geology was sound and the procedures were managed correctly. Properly stored nuclear waste deep underground is less dangerous than living in a high-background-radiation area like Cornwall.

But the problem is that you can't trust the nuclear industry to do it correctly. The history of it is a long litany of incompetence, irresponsibility, deliberate deceit and cover-ups. 'Storage' becomes dumping, 'reprocessing' becomes dilution, material is 'lost', accidents are denied or downplayed.

I used to trust the physicists and the engineers that nuclear was safe and that it was just uninformed hippy nonsense to be wary or fearful of it. I'm no longer sure that you can even trust the engineers, and you never could trust the managers and politicians.

Perhaps the population of Cumbria are familiar enough with the way the industry works now.

There was an interesting xkcd the other week about swimming in a nuclear waste pool!

http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

[ICBM]

There was an interesting xkcd the other week about swimming in a nuclear waste pool!

http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Probably all true!

The real problem comes if something serious fails and the water is allowed to overheat and evaporate off. That's what happened in one of the cooling ponds at Fukushima. OK, an earthquake and tsunami is not likely in the UK, but it *was* likely in Japan, and the engineers still designed a fail-unsafe system that couldn't cope with an entirely predictable chain of events - not just because they failed to allow for the size of the tsunami (which was large, but not outside the historic or predictable range), but because there was no backup for the backup, and once the reactors had been shut down they could not be restarted in order to generate power for the cooling system.

That's what I meant by not really trusting the engineers any more.

The big difference between nuclear and any other form of power generation is that only nuclear has the capacity to render part of the country effectively uninhabitable for decades if someone gets something wrong.